the cars around me and keeping an eye on the main entrance to the hotel. I can’t see Holt’s dark saloon car anywhere. But I do see a side entrance leading into the car park, a fire exit by the looks of it, slightly ajar after a staff member steps out for a cigarette break. After ten minutes, when there’s been no one suspicious coming or going from reception, I lock my car and walk quickly to the fire exit. I find myself in a side corridor away from main reception, quickly orientating myself. Ignore the lift. Take the stairs. On my corridor, I pull the stairwell door open a few inches, just enough to get a look each way. My room is only five doors away. The corridor looks clear, still no sign of Holt. I reach into my handbag and my fingers find the attack alarm that Tara gave me. Next to my keycard for the door. I hurry to my room and let myself in, a breath of relief pushing from my chest as the door slams shut behind me.
Silence. I flip on the lights and put the Tesco bag down on the desk, checking the bathroom in case there’s anyone hiding in there. It’s empty. I flip the security latch on the door, check the fisheye view of the corridor through the peephole, then take off my jacket and shoes, finally feeling some of the tension in my neck and shoulders start to ease. It feels better to have a solid door between me and the outside world.
I can’t stop thinking about Angela’s haunted expression as she sat with Zoe in the annexe, as she told me about her shattered family, weighed down with tragedy and grief. Circled by an unseen predator, who was waiting even now for his moment to finish what he started more than a year ago. Because it seems logical to assume that both her daughters were attacked by the same man. The same man who now wants to kill Mia – the clue to his identity he unknowingly left behind.
Holt. Markovitz. Church.
One of them is the Ghost.
My hunger has disappeared but I make myself open the pasta salad anyway, picking at it in its container, pouring wine into a plastic tumbler which doesn’t leave my hand until it’s empty again. The wine is a French Grenache, velvety and dark on my tongue, and I’m deep into my second cup and thinking about a third when an unfamiliar ringing breaks my train of thought.
It’s the hotel phone beside the bed, a little red light flashing below the keypad. Reception? I hadn’t asked for a call.
‘Hello?’
Silence. Broken by the sound of breathing from the other end of the line, slow breaths in and out.
‘Hello?’ I say again. ‘Who is this?’
The voice is precise, careful. Refined.
‘Have you figured it out yet, Ellen?’
I recognise the voice instantly, my stomach turning over.
Leon Markovitz.
I grab my mobile up off the bed. No missed calls. Plenty of charge. So why is he calling on the hotel landline? Before the question is even fully formed, the answer comes to me: to show he knows where I am. To show me he’s in control.
Nowhere is safe.
‘Figured what out?’ I manage to say.
‘What happens next.’
‘How did you find out where I am?’
‘You left a trail about a mile wide, Ellen. Not difficult to follow, not difficult at all. So how do you like the hotel? Nice view from the window?’
58
I reach over to pull the curtain aside. The car park below is a pool of deep shadows. A figure steps out of the darkness in the far corner, into the cone of half-light thrown by one of the street lamps. Dark clothes, a heavy coat, black hat and gloves. Mobile pressed to his ear. He doesn’t wave, doesn’t gesture at all. But he’s staring right up at my room, directly at me. I step back from the window and hit the light switch, not wanting to be outlined against the dark, an unpleasant bump of adrenaline tingling in my stomach.
‘What do you want, Leon?’
‘We never finished our conversation the other day.’
I rub at the fading marks on my neck from our last encounter. ‘Because you hit me with a stun gun.’
‘Yes, apologies for that.’ His voice sounds loud and close, as if his lips are pressed right to the mouthpiece. ‘That wasn’t my intention. But I had to. You didn’t give me any choice. You attacked me, you were going to